As a newbie to Drupal, you know what would help me? Purpose.
What I mean is that learning Drupal is cool, but learning it so that I can actually do something with it is even cooler. What I want to know is could someone come up with a few different types of sites and specifications so us new people can build those?
For instance, instead of just installing everything and figuring out what works, someone says:
"hey, build a social site with these features"
or
"build a site for a small school that needs these features"
or
you get the drift.
What this does is force us to scour through the modules to find which ones are appropriate and figure out how to configure them for a particular purpose.
I'd be completely willing to use pared-down specifications from real client sites. But instead of showing us the actual site and saying 'build this' (which actually has all the answers of how to implement a solution to a problem, or set of problem) we new folks would have to look at the specs of the site and figure out what and how to implement them ourselves.
It would be great if you experts could come up with say three sites for a beginner, intermediate and advanced level. It would be also useful to have some theming exercises or somethings.
I'm not much of a book learner, i'm more of a trial-by-fire learner, and i need someone to throw some gas at me, figuratively :)
is this making any sense?
Comments
second this, would love to
second this, would love to see this as a how-to site with screenshots (a Vlog would be cool, but ambitious), with multiple participants' implementations...showing that there's more than one way to peal a potato.
Using Drupal
The book "Using Drupal" does exactly this! Each chapter is a site.
update
Thanks Elijah. After much foot dragging, I got a copy of 'Using Drupal' and am loving it.
I've just copied drupal into eight folders and create their databases and will install them when I get the chance (by the end of the week). The aim is to go through 'Using Drupal' literally page-by-page on fresh installs to get how much more complicated :( and powerful :) Drupal is over Joomla.
Having been knee deep in Joomla (waiting for the boo's) . . . I find drupal to be real complex. But I'm not daunted at all. After installing and looking at lots of modules I thought were/are cool, I realized that I'm really going to have to literally build the site, as opposed to installing pre-packaged extensions (clusters of modules and views for you drupal heads) I really have to consider what to put where.
While it is frustrating to have to think through one more order of complexity, I am also satisfied with the ability to build really custom websites. I'm also very excited that I can get this whole new order of complexity and customization without having to learn code (no boo's, that's the next step). But having a background in teaching RDBS's (access, don't get too impressed) I get how building each page or block seems like a form and a view is a report, but i'm like 80% sure tha's the case. What I do like is the ability to build pages and views field-by-field, even though it's wicked laborious.
The other thing this adds, or requires is that I start learning how to sketch out sites. I'm not necessarily talking wireframes for templating (oops, you Drupal folk call it "theming") but in terms of architecture and creating a page-by-page view of what it is that I want. This is also a stark contrast because Joomla extensions came with all those pages pre-built. I also welcome the challenge of being more of an architect or site builder than a site configurer.
But admittedly, I pine for the days that I can find a pre-built extension that I can plug and play.
No more.
I'm a big boy now!
What I am also looking for, if anyone knows of something, is a pretty concise explanation of how drupal 'works'. I'm still a little unsure of what panels are, especially as opposed to pages . . . I'm pretty sure that there are wonderful explanations that you've found. However, they might be wonderful from the point of view of explaining it if you already know what you're doing. I'm looking for the explanations for the people that still have their head up their arse.
See you at Alpha on the 28th (1. if you go, and 2 if i remember)
what you don't know will inspire you
Progress
Hey, I'm making a good bit of progress through the book "Using Drupal". I think i'm getting the hang of this stuff, though it is still a bit complicated.
Now I'm having a problem. I think it might be a browser issue. I'm building in firefox, fyi.
I'm on the 7th chapter "photo" and cannot view the pictures I've uploaded in Chrome or IE8. They get the 'broken image' signs instead of loading the images. I thought it was permissions so I enabled anonymous users to be able to view pictures. So when I log out of the FF version, I can still view the images.
Thanks in advance.
what you don't know will inspire you
Try Switching to Garland: Does Problem Persist?
You wrote, "I'm on the 7th chapter "photo" and cannot view the pictures I've uploaded in Chrome or IE8."
That sentence is ambiguous, Do you mean:
A. I cannot view the pictures I've uploaded with Firefox when browsing with Chrome or IE8
B. When I use Chrome or IE8 to upload an image, it doesn't work.
In either case, an initial troubleshooting action would be to change the theme, preferably to Garland, and see if the problem persists. If it is okay in Garland, then you've at least narrowed the problem to the theming layer.
Again, more clarity about the scenario would be helpful. Also, are you using the latest stable versions of imagefield, imagecache, and filefield, and imageapi? That would be advisable.
Shai
Shai Gluskin
Content2zero
back on the horse
Sorry for the late reply, had a busy two weeks.
And Shai, sorry for the ambiguity. My problem is that I cannot view pictures in IE and firefox that I have uploaded in firefox. I have not uploaded any pictures using IE or Chrome. I upload the pictures in FF, but cannot view the pictures from IE or Chrome.
I also used the suggestion to use alternate themes, but regardless of the theme, the browser problem still persists.
Drupal 6.15
Imagefield 6.x-3.2
what you don't know will inspire you
You should check that your
You should check that your images are saved as RGB. Some browsers are more forgiving than others. Opening the problem images in photoshop and choose 'save for web' is one way to make sure the images are fine.
That's my bet, but my second guess would be that the image filenames have odd characters in them.
Update on Progress
I'm a rockstar! okay, not really, but I think I've come a long way in developing my Drupal skills since my first request for the Jungle Gym training program.
I did take your suggestions and went through the fabulous book "Using Drupal", thanks a bunch Elijah Lynn! I even picked up a copy (through interlibrary loan) of Pro Drupal Development v2 until I realized I wasn't a coder . . . give me a few months before I feel like I'll need to delve into code.
Site Building/Administration stuff:
Right now I'm progressing through mastering blocks (esp when not/to show), some ubercart (with uc_signup), and finally I'm going to tackle views.
Theming:
Seriously, I'm no graphic designer. Not even related to one. I can't even make pretty pictures with paint-by numbers. However, I really do appreciate the contributed themes. And in that vein, I do want to mention that Fusion and Skinr are great for themers (right now I'm working with Aquia-Marina at least as my admin theme). However, new on the scene especially for newbies are the great modules Display Suite and Sweaver. I haven't played around with Sweaver much yet but the screencast or two they have look like it's what I need. But Display Suite does what Content Template and Section Order can't which is rearrange fields easily. It supplies you with a five region content space (header, footer, right, left, body) and all the fields of a node, teaser or any other view(!) which can then be rearranged within that content object! (apologies if i'm using the wrong terminology). So yes you can now rearrange fields within a node without having to theme them (but you will still need to for formatting fields). We'll see how far Sweaver gets me with creating pretty sites, but I know there's no module/interface to manage and manipulate images (like straight/cut/rounded corners) etc for a theme. When that comes out, I will be able to really make my own ugly sites easily!
Pat on my own back/Self-reflection
I'd also like to say that I'm familiar with this point-and-click web development from my experience with SharePoint and Joomla . . . which can be replaced by Drupal+Alfresco and Drupal respectively so I'm progressing pretty fast (I figure right now I'm a 3.5 star site builder (out of five) but I tend to think highly of myself until I see other people better than me).
Next up
Next up is Views, CVS/SVN, Drush and Features, maybe some search and performance (pressflow, apc) when i get bored [i gotta XP->Ubuntu but i'm dragging my feet].
thanks and hints
It's been a great fun learning this. I would like to say that having a new good friend as a Drupal developer helps, even though he hasn't really helped me with anything, knowing that I have him as a resource in a pinch is invaluable. It would be nice to have some kind of Drupaldelphia buddy-system to help other newbies like myself get connected and more importantly supported while learning Drupal.
thanks a bunch for the help throughout the thread, and see you all at the next meeting . . . which begs the question . . .
what you don't know will inspire you
More updates
First off, I don't know if its the voyeur in me, but I'd like more folks to be sharing what they're working on . . .
Currently I'm developing www.Bizsprouts.org for an organization I'm a member of. We had Bluehost and after installing every module under the sun (it seems like) i'm starting to hit the shared hosting wall. Recently we moved to a VPS and I'm realizing that this is an even bigger move than I thought. I am learning that the stuff that I took for granted (backups, mail, cpanel etc) I'd have to custom build. The cool thing is I learned computers on windows 3.1 which meant that all the cool stuff still happened in dos, so i'm becoming a command line afficianado all over again.
So far I put in the LAMP stack and hardened it with two or three recommended "packages". Now I am looking for a simple mail server but can't really find something that seems 'definitive'. . . . which leads me to ask
Does anyone know about any somewhat basic/comprehensive overview or tutorial for how to set up a VPS specifically for Drupal (or any opensource cms)? If this was a general thing, I'd like it to have a list of packages to install, and preferably explains what they do, etc (things like httpd vs nignx vs apache). And this would include such lofty things such as varnish and pressflow if specific to Drupal. (note acquia devcloud is financially out of reach but sounds like it'd be fun, not to mention many modules on the site don't have D7 versions).
So while the book Using Drupal as suggested above was FANTASTIC, it doesn't seem like there's much organized and/or comprehensive information about the environment that Drupal lives in.
what you don't know will inspire you
A lamp stack is how you set
A lamp stack is how you set up a VPS for a php cms. The .htaccess files will be specific to install. I use an open source alternative to CPanel called kloxo/Lxadmin which includes all of the necessary components for running a php driven site, specifically qmail for mail purposes; webmin is also popular. Do resell hosting to your clients? I suggest http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ for questions similar to those addressed above, but feel free to post any other questions you have here or contact me.